September 4, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 3 min read · Flashback Friday
Before phones in every pocket, a meaningful chunk of casual news-checking happened through teletext — punching a three-digit page number into the TV remote and waiting, with what now looks like remarkable patience, for a simple grid of text and blocky colour to slowly assemble itself on screen. It was clunky, slow by any modern standard, and genuinely beloved by people who grew up checking it daily.
How It Actually Worked
Television broadcasts carried hidden data alongside the normal picture, and a teletext-capable TV or set-top box could decode that data into pages of text and simple graphics — news headlines, weather, sport scores, even early, basic classified ads — navigated entirely by typing specific page numbers on your remote. No images beyond simple blocky graphics, no scrolling in the modern sense, just page after numbered page of genuinely useful, regularly updated information.
The Specific, Very Real Patience It Required
Pages took a genuinely noticeable moment to load, and if you mistyped a page number, you simply waited it out and tried again rather than easily backing up the way you would on any modern app. There was a particular, distinct kind of patience built around teletext that's almost completely foreign to how we expect information to behave now — instantly, on demand, the moment we think to look for it.
Why It Was Genuinely Useful for Its Time
For a long stretch, teletext was actually the fastest, easiest way to check certain specific information — sports scores during a match you weren't watching live, a quick weather check, breaking headlines — considerably faster than waiting for a scheduled news bulletin, and well before anyone could simply pull a phone out of their pocket to check instantly instead.
What Killed It, Eventually
The internet, obviously, and then smartphones specifically, made checking literally anything dramatically faster and more comprehensive than a few hundred numbered teletext pages could ever realistically compete with. The transition wasn't sudden — teletext lingered for years as broadband and mobile internet slowly took over the exact same role, just far more comprehensively and far faster.
What's Genuinely Been Lost
There was something almost meditative about the specific, bounded nature of teletext — a fixed, finite, known set of pages, rather than the genuinely infinite, bottomless scroll of information available now. You couldn't fall down an hour-long rabbit hole on teletext. There simply wasn't enough content there to fall into, which, looking back from where we've ended up now, feels like an underrated, accidental virtue rather than the limitation it felt like at the time.
Why I Think About This With Current Technology
Every "this is just how you check information now" assumption eventually looks as dated as punching three-digit codes into a TV remote once looked. I genuinely wonder, sometimes, what feature of how we currently use phones and AI tools will look just as quaint and clunky to someone looking back at this exact period, twenty years from whenever they happen to be reading about it.
If You Remember Checking the Footy Scores This Way
You'll remember the specific colours, the specific font, and probably at least one page number memorised permanently into the part of your brain that still, slightly uselessly, holds onto things like old phone numbers. It's a genuinely strange, specific kind of nostalgia, and it's one I don't think gets nearly enough proper credit.